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South African Solidarity with Palestinians: Motivations, Strategies, and Impact Rajini Srikanth University of Massachusetts Boston, [email protected]

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South African Solidarity with Palestinians: Motivations, Strategies, and Impact Rajini Srikanth University of Massachusetts Boston, Rajini.Srikanth@Umb.Edu New England Journal of Public Policy Volume 27 | Issue 1 Article 3 6-1-2015 South African Solidarity with Palestinians: Motivations, Strategies, and Impact Rajini Srikanth University of Massachusetts Boston, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp Part of the Near and Middle Eastern Studies Commons, and the Race, Ethnicity and Post- Colonial Studies Commons Recommended Citation Srikanth, Rajini (2015) "South African Solidarity with Palestinians: Motivations, Strategies, and Impact," New England Journal of Public Policy: Vol. 27: Iss. 1, Article 3. Available at: http://scholarworks.umb.edu/nejpp/vol27/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. It has been accepted for inclusion in New England Journal of Public Policy by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at UMass Boston. For more information, please contact [email protected]. New England Journal of Public Policy South African Solidarity with Palestinians: Motivations, Strategies, and Impact Rajini Srikanth University of Massachusetts Boston South African support for Palestine received a compelling articulation in 1990 by the late President Nelson Mandela. This article examines a more recent grassroots activism by South Africans for Palestinian self-determination. It discusses the historical legacy of anti-apartheid resistance as well as current economic and political realities within South Africa that have led to the emergence of a robust popular movement for Palestinian rights since 2005. Both South African civil society organizations and the ANC-led government have responded to the 2005 call by Palestinian civil society for a boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign against the state of Israel. The article discusses the different motivations of these two groups for participating in the BDS movement, presents the scope of BDS within South Africa, and analyzes its symbolic, economic, and political impact for South Africans and Palestinians, in the near and long term. Finally, it addresses the question of why South Africans consider themselves to be central participants in the Palestinian struggle. ___________________________________________________________________________ On February 6, 2014, members of the South African parliament and a range of civil society organizations attended a conference in Cape Town to declare solidarity with the “oppressed peoples of Palestine, western Sahara, and Cuba.” They issued the Cape Town Declaration of support. With respect to Palestine, the declaration makes fourteen recommendations for action. These include stopping all financial transactions with companies and banks operating in the Israeli settlements of the Occupied Palestinian Territories, mobilizing forces to suspend Israel’s membership in the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, known as SWIFT, the worldwide banking network, and supporting the campaign to free the Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti and other Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli prisons. Furthermore, the declaration calls on all political parties within South Africa to articulate their positions on “the plight of the Palestinian peoples” and to make these positions known before the 2014 national elections in May.1 Sustained organizing on behalf of Palestinian rights has been under way for almost a decade in South Africa, stimulated by the Palestinian civil society’s 2005 call to isolate Israel through the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which is modeled on the campaign in the twentieth century to isolate apartheid South Africa. Solidarity with Palestine in South Africa goes back even further than 2005. In 1990, in an interview with Ted Koppel in New York, Nelson Mandela made a strong declaration of support for the Palestine Liberation Organization’s fight for self-determination, and in 1997 he asserted, “We know all too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”2 This article discusses the activism since 2005 within South Africa for the cause of the Palestinians and examines its significance. Activism for Palestine within South Africa is robust, particularly at the grassroots level. On Rajini Srikanth is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston. 1 New England Journal of Public Policy August 9, 2014, tens of thousands (estimates range from a low of thirty thousand to a high of two hundred thousand) of protestors marched through the streets of Cape Town decrying Israel’s bombing of Gaza and calling for a severing of South Africa’s diplomatic and trade ties with Israel. This “Day of Rage,” the organizers insisted, was not an exceptional demonstration. Rather, they averred, “We are promoting the line that people need to organize on the ground, and solidarity doesn’t stop when the bombings on Gaza stop. That is a big political point to get across. Our main target now is BDS and pressuring our government to cut ties with Israel.”3 The core of activists in South Africa who organize protests against what they see as Israel’s imperial project in Palestine and its discriminatory policies against Palestinians is pressuring the government, which is led by the African National Congress (ANC), to end all interactions with Israel. These activists are deeply disappointed by what they view as the duplicitous assertions by the government that, on one hand, trumpets its activist stance for Palestinian rights while, on the other, continues to do business with Israel. In the summer of 2014, for instance, President Jacob Zuma declared that “the country was outraged by the ‘continued violence that is claiming scores of lives of civilians in Palestine.’” Two days later, Zuma criticized Hamas, and a spokesperson for the Department of Trade and Industry announced that there were “no plans to impose trade restrictions on Israel amid its conflict with Palestine.”4 Activists consider such statements to be the ANC-led government’s way of having it both ways—of providing a seemingly supportive response to the groundswell of clamor to condemn Israel’s violation of Palestinian rights and sever all ties with Israel while keeping open the avenues of trade that are seen to benefit South Africa economically. Whatever the complications of the ANC’s shifting positions, one thing is clear: the conversation about support for Palestine is robust at the grassroots level and in chambers of political power. This ongoing and public airing of support for the Palestinian peoples marks South Africa as a unique international site in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination and justice. Yet, notwithstanding the visible escalation of solidarity with Palestine, one might ask to what extent such a gesture matters in a material sense. What global impact can one expect from South Africa’s heightened commitment to the Palestinian cause, and, more important, what effect does this solidarity have on the Palestinian peoples? At a fundamental level, South African support offers hope to Palestine. A democratic South Africa stands as the teleological end to a narrative of resistance and international solidarity, the successful culmination of an internal and an external global campaign that yields long-awaited liberation and the opportunity for self-determination. For the Palestinian peoples, the South African case is a model to be emulated; when the people of South Africa actively demonstrate their support, Palestinians feel confirmed in their adoption of the South African paradigm, and they are energized for the protracted campaign in which they realize they must engage. The 2005 Palestinian civil society’s BDS call refers directly to the South African struggle against apartheid: “We, representatives of Palestinian civil society, call upon international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era.”5 Ali Abunimah, a prominent Palestinian activist and author, asserts that South African solidarity for Palestine though only symbolic is “profoundly” so. Abunimah observes that Nelson Mandela’s death reminded many Palestinians of his clear and unequivocal support for Palestinian self-determination. Furthermore, he adds, the fact that activism for Palestine within South Africa has been predominantly generated and sustained by the people lends it 2 New England Journal of Public Policy legitimacy and value.6 (As discussed in a later section, the South African ANC-led government is a latecomer to this campaign.) Although, for now, South African support for Palestine is likely to have no influence on the official US government position, it may have an impact at the grassroots level and among civil society organizations in the United States. Because the anti-apartheid movement in the United States was generated from the ground up, South Africa’s involvement in the Palestinian cause may stimulate the American people to remember their participation in the global struggle for a democratic South Africa and rekindle that spirit in the cause of the Palestinian peoples. One might cautiously claim that ground-level support for Palestine within South Africa (where dozens of civil society and trade union organizations are listed as part of this effort) could catalyze similar ground-level support within the United States.7 Undoubtedly, however, such support would be muscularly thwarted by the many
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